Distilled and deconstructed

May 26, 2010|Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent

To say that painter Frank Egloff works from photographs is an understatement. Egloff changes tones, fracturing and reconstructing pictures. He prods our tendency to take photographic reality as fact, asking painterly questions about surface, facture, color, and illusion.

Egloff’s expansive show at Clark Gallery includes a meaty selection of his explorations of work by photographers such as John Deakin, Man Ray, and Garry Winogrand. In “after William Klein, 1961 (Pachinko doorman, Tokyo),’’ he deconstructs the fashion and travel photographer. Klein is known for using motion blur, and here the right side of the frame is filled with the fuzzy, leering grin of a man mugging for the camera. On the left, a man with his back to us dominates a sidewalk. Egloff breaks the image down the middle with a change in tone — from underwater blue to bottle green, both monochromes, and colors that distance the viewer from the bustling, agitated scene.

Although Egloff usually works in monochromes, the garish, tongue-in-cheek “from Richelieu, 1989’’ has him punching up color. The source photo was a jewelry ad. Egloff’s version shows an elegant, aqua-skinned woman in an off-the-shoulder red wrap against a gray ground. She wears a choker that looks like woven strings of shells or wooden beads, a bland beige that pops against the blue skin.

Viewers often wonder if Egloff has used a transfer process to get these images on canvas (he doesn’t) — his re-creations are precise down to skin texture. But his most recent work is completely different, a line drawing made with a pigment marker. “Pollock’s car, 10:15 p.m., Saturday, August 11, 1956, Fireplace Road, the Springs, East Hampton, NY,’’ borrows from a photograph of the scene after Jackson Pollock died crashing his Oldsmobile convertible.

It distills the image of the overturned car beneath a tree in spare black and white. The crazy, splattering lines of the leaves above and the grass beneath the car hauntingly echo Pollock’s paintings, but bled of color and texture.

Egloff is still square in the middle of the intersection of photography and painting with this piece, but it’s a radical turn in a new, intriguing direction.

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